Renesas and BlackBerry expand partnership on R-car development environment

October 26, 2018

Image: BlackBerry

Renesas Electronics Corporation is expanding its partnership with BlackBerry to use BlackBerry’s QNX software in its development environment for its R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) devices. This integrates virtualization, functional safety and security to expand the R-Car automotive computing platform, so systems designers can create advanced cockpit systems and develop user experience.

The development environment features BlackBerry’s QNX Software Development Platform 7.0 and QNX Hypervisor 2.0 virtualization software, as well as access to BlackBerry’s software suite for multimedia, HMI and cockpit graphics systems. It is said to offer both high reliability and rich graphics; functions such as virtual instrument cluster and navigation are isolated so a fault in one cannot corrupt another. Guest operating systems such as Android and Linux can also run independently on a single R-car device.

Masayasu Yoshida, senior director of the automotive technical customer engagement division, Renesas, said in a statement: “The combination of BlackBerry and Renesas technology is used [already] in many volume production programs globally. This speaks directly to the quality of the relationship between our companies. BlackBerry QNX software is always highly reliable. For Renesas, a company that strives to provide safe and secure solutions, BlackBerry is the best possible partner and we plan to continue our joint development efforts going forward.”

The two firms see particular demand for their fully-integrated hardware and software in China, where rapid development in connected transportation is taking place, and future plans include accelerating their integrated cockpit and connected car systems as well as building on their ADAS and ECU technologies.